§
So went we down that river to the gates of the sea and here, if you will excuse me, I must indulge in an orgy of commonplace. I am going to compare the last reaches of a river and its meeting with the sea to the ending of human life.
Oh commonplace! Bed of repose for the jaded mind of the wretched scribbler! Stock in trade of all politicians! Solid foundation for every kind of pronouncement and guaranteeing not only the writers and speakers, but the whole movement of the human mind permanent and comfortable repose! I am not ashamed to make of commonplace my meat and drink, my human food, and I am quite certain it is even better for the reader than for the writer. For when the reader comes upon a Commonplace he leaps up to meet it, welcoming a friend familiar to him through his whole life. He says to himself, ‘Ah! Now I know where I am!’
So with this commonplace of the last reaches of the river and the last years of sentient mortality before we come to that sea wherein some say that the spirit of man is absorbed and lost, but others more wisely advance that it travels in a novel fashion to new places. Anyhow, no one can deny that this parallel between the river as it meets the sea, even the River Gota at Gothenburg, and the salutation to Death is a Commonplace, and very glad I am to have set it down here.
§
The sun set as we sailed out into the Cattegat, which is also called the Belt, or, as I said earlier, the Sleeve.
It was calm weather and we caught at last the winking light upon the Danish coast beyond, and so off into the North Sea, of which the poet sings:
‘The moving mind that God gave me
Is manifold as the wide North Sea,
And as the sea is full of things
The great fish in their wanderings
And the spread gallies of the old kings
And darkness eddying round in rings,
So, packed with all that I have done
And felt and known and lost and won,
By the tide drifted and the wind inclined
Moves my not measurable mind.’
In the North Sea my return to the Baltic ended.
Dedication
To Poor Old Woden
“And so the Truth comes round by lies again
How men make gods, gods women, women men”
(Motto to be set up on the tomb of Woden, whenever it shall be identified; and whenever it is it will be somewhere near Upsala.)
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Hilaire Belloc
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ISBN: 9781448204007
eISBN: 9781448203413
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